Macromedia Flash Player
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The Macromedia Flash Player is a multimedia and application player created and distributed by Macromedia. It runs SWF files which can be created by the Macromedia Flash authoring tool, Macromedia Flex or a number of other Macromedia and third party tools.
It has support for an embedded scripting language called ActionScript, which is based on ECMAScript.
The Flash Player was originally designed to display 2-dimensional vector animation, but has since evolved to support Rich Internet Applications and streaming video and audio.
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Supported Platforms
The Flash Player is available on a wide range of platforms, operating systems, and devices, including GNU/Linux x86, Windows, Mac OS 9/X, Solaris, HP-UX, Pocket PC, OS/2, Symbian, Palm OS, BeOS, and IRIX.
Approximately 95% of PC's have some version of the Flash Player installed, making it a very attractive development and animation platform for developers. New versions of Flash player typically take about a year to achieve 85% market penetration.
Flash is being rapidly adapted to deliver mobile phone content, with the number of mobiles phones supporting Flash Lite increasing substantially year-by-year.
History
Player versions
- Macromedia Flash Player 2
- First version under Macromedia brand
- Mostly vectors and motion, some bitmaps, limited audio
- Macromedia Flash Player 3
- Added alpha transparency, licensed MP3 compression
- Macromedia Flash Player 4
- Macromedia Flash Player 5
- Macromedia Flash Player 6 (March 2002)
- Support for the consuming Flash Remoting and Web Service (SOAP)
- Support for screenreaders via Microsoft Active Accessibility
- Added Sorenson Sparc video codec
- Macromedia Flash Player 7 (September 2003)
- supports streaming audio and video
- supports ActionScript 2.0, an Object-Oriented Programming Language for developers
- Macromedia Flash Player 8 (August 2005)
- support of GIF and PNG bitmapped images
- new video codec
- improved runtime performance
- live filters such as blur and drop shadow
- file upload and download capabilities
- crisp pixel-perfect text rendering
- adds On2 VP6 video codec
- Flash Player Lite
- Support Flash Player 5 content
Future Flash Players
- Flash Player 8.5 (alpha)
- Actionscript 3
- new ECMAScript scripting engine, order-of-magnitude faster
- Flash Lite 2.0 (beta)
- Support Flash Player 7 content
See also
External links
- Macromedia.com Official Flash Player information and download page
